High Occupancy Vehicle Monitoring

In recent years there has been an increased public awareness and need for the automatic detection of people, faces or other objects in high risk installations such as airports. There are several alterative technologies available such as retinal scanning, finger print reading and face recognition. These technologies are actively researched within the iims group.

The ability to detect and/or recognise a human with in an image is very valuable for this airport security type of situation. However, it does have many other applications such as bank transaction authorisation (a PIN number replacement); crowd monitoring; identification of known criminals within shops; and vehicle monitoring.

The HOVMON project is about using these technologies in the field of traffic flow. There are an increasingly growing number of high occupancy only lanes in Britain's roads. These lanes reduce the number of vehicles at peak times by only allowing cars with two or more occupants to use them, and so giving an incentive for people to car share. The HOVMON project is using face detection technologies to automate the enforcement of the scheme. -Philip Birch